Mark Cuban rips high-frequency trading

Billionaire investor and entrepreneur Mark Cuban reacts to Michael Lewis' allegations the stock market is "rigged," and what risks exist with high-frequency trading.

High-frequency trading introduces a great deal of risk into the market, billionaire investor Mark Cuban said Monday on CNBC.

"The risk isn't so much about the small investor," he said. "The risk is all these different high-frequency traders playing a game with their algorithms, trying to trick each other, to get in front of each other to make that trade.

"And because we don't know all the algorithms, because we don't know the end factorial, all of the different ways they may interact and the negative consequences that occur as a result. That introduces a market risk. That market risk has an unquantifiable cost."

On CNBC's "Halftime Report," Cuban said that he didn't know what the solution was.

"But what I do know is that high-frequency trading does nothing to stimulate or support capital formation in markets," he said. "I do know that the idea of owning a share of stock in the company is supposed to be about ownership in that company.

"Maybe it comes down to something like giving companies the opportunity to say, 'You know what? If you're going to buy a share of our stock, we require you to hold it for a minute or a day or a week, whatever it may be because that's an expectation, a requirement for our shareholders. Because at the end of the day, owning a share of stock is supposed to be about owning equity in a company, and I think we've lost track of that, and that's a real problem."

Cuban has been a vocal critic of high-frequency trading. In April, he criticized HFT as problematic for the stock market.

"There's so many problems with where the market is in today because the market doesn't know what business it's in," he said. "It literally is no longer in the business of providing capital for companies to grow, and that's a huge problem."

High-frequency trading made headlines over the weekend following a "60 Minutes" interview with Michael Lewis, author of "Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt," who said that the stock market was "rigged."